Questions concerning God and the soul - whether or not God exists,
whether or not we have immortal souls, where we came from, where we go
when we die - are perhaps the most ``important'' of the pseudoquestions
invented by mankind (measured by how much we care about the answers).
They are also in some sense the most unanswerable of all of the
unanswerable questions. We have axioms that work pretty well at
describing the Universe in a way that leads us to believe that we
understand ``something'' about how it all works, how it all is put
together, but these axioms fail when applied to the concept of God.

Hume argued very convincingly that empirical proof, entering our
knowledge through the narrow window of our finite senses, can never
suffice to prove the infinite. Not the infinite in space, not the
infinite in time, since we can sample neither one. In particular,
however, Hume focussed on the infinite concept we call God. It is
fairly easy to see that no observations, no experiments, suffice to
empirically prove the existence of God. If a thundering voice
comes out of the sky telling us to bow down and be afraid, is it God?
Is it an advanced race10.1 as of
Space Aliens (maybe even space aliens who are here To Serve
Man10.2)? Only completely
consistent empirical proof of Godlike Power throughout all space
and all time and beyond would suffice, although I'm sure a really
plausible alien could go a long way without being suspected just as
Cortez went a long way in Mexico without being suspected.

Rational proof is even more out of the question, since any attempt at a
rational proof will require axioms, and axioms are, as we've hammered
home repeatedly in this book, not provable. Even given a fairly
reasonable, not too controversial set of axioms, many attempts at
proofs, many attempts to even discuss the concept of God involve
self-referential categorical superlatives and rapidly leave you tied up
in Gödelian knots.

OK, so it's difficult. OK, so it is more than difficult, it's impossible. None of this has stopped humans from trying their best to
work out answers that work for them. God as a concept, as a
possibly imaginary Father Figure or Mother Figure, has been very, very
good for the human race, a good that outweighs even the not
insubstantial amount of bad that has come along with it. God (in almost
every culture on Earth) has been closely tied to the ethical and
the political evolution of the human species, largely because
religions have been closely tied to the evolution of social structure of
humans living together, which requires both political structures for
decision making and ethical systems to form the glue that keeps us all
from killing each other on a whim. Sometimes, at least.

A culture that is too self-destructive of its own members does not
survive and is supplanted by cultures that are more conservative and
beneficial. There is therefore survival pressure on religions (as a
dominant part of a culture) to be socially beneficial, at least
within the context of the surrounding competing
societies10.3.

Later we'll look at axioms associated with political and ethical systems
that attempt to be beneficial in the same way explicitly independent of
any religion. These have arisen fairly recently, although the marriage
between church and state was never perfect even throughout the millenia
it endured. Regardless, and politics filed for a divorce a few hundred
years ago and has been bumbling along on its own ever since, and since
states that are at least overtly free from any single dominant
religion have thus far been more successful than those states and
cultures that are dominated by religion, the idea of religious freedom
has gradually spread to the point of being reluctantly embraced even by
certain religions. For the moment, however, let's look at the axioms of
religion as the memes of a ``living superentity'' in and of itself.

This requires that we look carefully at some fundamental concepts of
religion - the notion of God, of course, but God per se is one of the
least important parts of any successful religion.
Religions that just talk about God and not about how its members
should behave, cut their hair (or not), have their foreskins removed
(or not), how and when it is OK to have sex, how much money one should
plan on giving the local priesthood - they just don't make it.

This thus makes sense, but even if you doubt it it is perfectly evident
empirically from examining any religious scripture and just cutting out
and weighing amount of text spent discussing God in and of Himself
compared to the amount of time they spend discussing what God wants
us to do, that is, sin, ritual, duty, history of the past (and how Bad
Things happened to them as didn't believe in the Holy Scriptures), and
the history of the future (and how Bad Things gonna happen to them as
don't believe in the Holy Scriptures). More than ten to one. Maybe
even a hundred to one.